Beverly Bird - Playing By The Rules

Damn Grace. I rubbed my forehead again.

“Neck rub?” he asked, noticing.

“Just uncork the wine, Sam. And hurry.”

I blame Sam’s wine as much as I blame anything else for what happened next. By nine o’clock, when Chloe was tucked into bed, my eyes were closed and my head was tilted back against the sofa cushions. My feet were propped on the coffee table. So were Sam’s. He was on the other end of the sofa.

“You know what the problem is?” he asked me suddenly.

I made the kind of noise in my throat that said I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, but that he should go on, anyway.

“With dating,” he clarified.

I opened one eye. “Ah, that problem. Your way or mine? Excessively or rarely?”

“I don’t date excessively.” He sat up straight, indignantly. “Saturday night comes every week. I just like to use it accordingly.”

“Sam, you date on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, too.”

“My point is that too much or too little of this dating business is equally frustrating.”

He was staring down into his scotch glass now. His expression was serious. After a day filled with Grace’s observations and Mill’s custody petition, Sam’s suddenly pensive mood worried me.

“You go out with a woman for the first time and she expects all these subtle little things to immediately click right into place,” he continued. “Talk about pressure.”

“As opposed to men,” I asked, “who don’t give a damn about things clicking one way or the other?”

He looked over at me and his face took on that offended look again. “That’s not true. We give a damn.”

“Before or after you catch sight of the finish line?”

“Both.”

I rolled my eyes to show my opinion of that. “Continue. What little things?”

“Mental stimulation. Good conversation. Mental stability. Sexual attraction. Everything is supposed to happen all at once, and men are looking for that, too. I mean, some of us want it and some of us run like hell when it’s there, but it’s still an issue.”

Suddenly, I was sure that Grace had repeated to him everything I’d told her earlier about my own over-thirty-five theory, my three-Cs rule of thumb—companionship, comfort and conversation. This was a little spooky.

“Have you been talking to Grace?” I demanded.

Sam looked around my living room as though expecting to find her there. “Not since McGlinchey’s. Why?”

“What did she say to you?”

He looked at me oddly. “You were there. You heard the whole conversation. You were part of it.”

“You didn’t talk to her privately?”

“When would I have done that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re really acting strange tonight,” he said.

I grabbed the wine bottle from the coffee table and topped off my glass. “Having your daughter’s father sue you for custody can do that to a woman.” I’d filled him in on the problem after dinner when Chloe had gone to her room to watch television.

Sam waved a hand negligently. “I told you I’d handle that.”

“And I told you no thanks.”

“You’re too close to it to represent yourself.”

And he was closer to it than he knew. I could only imagine Mill’s reaction if Sam—the man I was reputedly seeing—appeared with me in court. “Get back to your point,” I prodded him. “You were philosophizing.”

Sam slanted another look my way. “Okay. The thing is, somebody is always waiting, wanting, hoping for all those little things to click into place and coincide.”

“The mental stimulation, the conversation and the animal attraction,” I said to clarify.

“I didn’t say animal. Who said anything about animal?”

I realized I had claws on my mind again. “Well, that’s what we’re all looking for, right?”

His brows climbed his forehead. “Are you?”

I definitely wasn’t going to get into that discussion again. “We were talking about you, Sam.”

“All right. Fine. We’ll call it animal attraction. But it never happens, you know. Either you get the mental stimulation going, but then the animal business is missing—or it’s there, but the woman turns out to be a Looney-Toon, emotionally unstable. Or she thinks you’re great and you think she’s about as interesting as a can of vegetables.”

I got stuck on the emotionally unstable part. “Like Tammy?”

He didn’t argue it. He just shrugged. “Then you’re left trying to wriggle free without hurting anyone’s feelings or wearing some pink drink,” he said.

He was like that, I knew. He worried as much about hurting women as I did about bad parenthood. “You looked ridiculous, by the way.”

He didn’t rise to the bait. He lifted his glass and swallowed the last of his scotch. “I just get tired of it, Mandy. But it’s like some kind of…of addiction. We keep scrambling after it because we need that male-female thing going on in our lives. And the need makes us keep going out there, bashing our heads against walls, smashing ourselves all up, getting drinks tossed in our faces, just because we had the audacity to look for a partner who’s on the same wavelength.”

“Wavelengths are shifty little things,” I agreed.

He stood and went to the kitchen to retrieve his bottle of scotch. When he came back, he bent and picked up his shoes from my living room floor. Then he stood at the door, armed with all of it. “On that note, I’m going home,” he said. “Thanks for dinner.”

Suddenly I felt an overriding need to set everything back to the way we had been in the courtroom that afternoon. I wanted to banish Grace’s insane observations and Mill’s innuendoes from the air. Maybe I just figured that by reminding us of what we were supposed to be, we would be able keep it so.

“You know, it’s really great to have a male-type friend,” I said. “It’s nice to talk like this, to get a masculine perspective.”

“That’s me,” Sam said shortly. “Male-type.” Then he left. Quickly.

I frowned after him. I knew him well enough to understand that somehow or other, I had just hurt him. But how? Then my heart hit the wall of my chest. Did he not want to be just a male-type friend anymore?

I shook my head. This was Grace’s doing. Such a thought would never even have occurred to me five hours ago.

Or maybe it was the wine, I thought. I’d had too much of it. I narrowed my eyes to focus them on the door he had just passed through. There was only one door there, so I was not drunk. Nope, I was fine.

Either way, now that I was alone, a million little demon thoughts came spewing out of the recesses of my mind to hoot and holler. Most of them wore little T-shirts labeled Sex and Sam. It came to me then that I probably wasn’t going to be able to sleep until I knew why he’d been insulted by what I’d said. I got to my feet, still looking at the door. I put my wine down on the coffee table. The Sex and Sam goblins were jumping gleefully up and down by now, clapping their hands. A tiny, sane part of me told me to go to bed right now. So, of course, I listened to the demon-goblins.

I peeked into Chloe’s room. She was sound asleep. I tiptoed in, kissed her forehead, then I closed her door quietly behind me. I left my apartment and stood in the hall, looking at the stairs to the second floor.

If I came right out and asked him if he wanted to be more than just my male-type pal, I knew I was going to get my pride kicked hard. For one thing I wasn’t his type physically—not a blond hair in sight. For another, if he’d had any romantic designs on me whatsoever, I figured he would have acted on them a long time ago. We’d known each other for nearly six months, and Sam is definitely not the reticent sort.